The 68th annual Grammy Awards reignited a historic debate in American history.
While the night was full of surprises, Billie Eilish’s statement during her acceptance speech for the Song of the Year award sparked a historic debate.
While criticizing ICE, she said, “f*** ICE. No one is illegal on stolen land.”
Although Billie’s sentiment was clearly to sympathize with the victims of ICE in Minneapolis, her statement about “stolen land” started a debate on social media.
The question of whether the United States was built on “stolen land” is a deep and polarizing historical debate that has been revived in modern political discourse.
The argument is mainly based on the violent removal of Native Americans and the constitutionality of the western expansion of the land.
In the eyes of the indigenous community, the simplest word stolen is used in reference to a known history of systematic extermination, broken agreements and warfare.
Beginning with early colonization and growing in strength through 19th-century policies such as the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the Trail of Tears, Native nations were forcibly removed from their ancestral lands.
The forced relocation of the Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw nations resulted in the deaths of an estimated 4,000 to 15,000 indigenous people due to disease, exposure, and starvation.
Researchers observe that indigenous peoples lost more than 98 percent of their lands to treaties signed under coercion or under some form of deception, and only approximately 2 percent of reservations are still there today.
Another, often mentioned perspective of conquest claims that the world of the time was characterized by land transfer in every form of warfare and change in power relations.
Some historians have echoed this statement, saying that European powers, and subsequently the United States, entered a continent that already had tribal warfare and territorial issues, and engaged in conquest rather than robbery of a united and peaceful society.
A key area of error is the legality of treaties. Since the United States government existed under a treaty-making legal structure, most of the treaties were obtained either by coercion or fraud and later violated by the federal government; thus, they did not carry significant weight among most native tribes and historians.
Finally, the American framing of the United States as a nation based on stolen land is largely conditioned by focusing on the ethical and coercive aspects of US expansion or the legal and martial conquest achieved today.
Although the mass displacement and cultural extinction of Native American cultures is an undisputed historical reality, the explanation of this past is one of the most characteristic arguments of the nation.
